For Design, Usability and SEO Simplicity Is Key
Simplicity is key for design, usability or SEO. Their focus differs substantially yet they have one thing in common.
Simplicity and simplifying the user interface aka website improves the overall performance.
In SEO 2.0 we do not focus solely on search engines, or other media that drive traffic.
We try to optimize the overall user experience. From this perspective,
- design
- usability
- SEO
are all part of the same process and not different disciplines.
What do experts on those subjects say? Let’s cite a few of them. iA information architects explain:
Simple websites are easy to use, easy to understand, nice to look at. In practice, websites are either unusable or ugly and filled with too many words.
Similarly Jakob Nielsen, the #1 authority when it comes to usability says:
Dialogues should not contain information which is irrelevant or rarely needed. Every extra unit of information in a dialogue competes with the relevant units of information and diminishes their relative visibility.
Keep it simple!
One of the areas where I’m seeing SEO and usability both needing improvement in “SEO 2.0” is what I’ve taken to calling “midstream” usability. Search users arrive at sites these days somewhere in the middle; instead of sending them back to the home-page to start over, we need to take the work savings that Google has given us and help those users successfully navigate from anywhere in our sites.
Good point. I agree. Landing pages are a good step in this direction. I will employ them sooner or later at SEO 2.0.